Here's why I haven't written.

This probably won't be a funny post. Oh, who am I kidding? It might be a little funny - I can't help it. But if you read me primarily to laugh, you won't hurt my feelings if you click away now. I'll try to have a funny one next time.

Some of y'all have beheld my brilliance since the time when all I wrote about was my sucktastic knitting, long before I gave myself permission to let the F-bombs fall where they may. If you've been with me since before this blog was funny, then may the God you believe in bless you.

Over the last few years, you've been here for potty training, my boys starting kindergarten and my girl starting junior high, phone harrassment, Lubaba, Swamp Thing... and I've truly felt your presence in my life during the good and the bad.

You've kinda watched my kiddos grow up on my blog, and so have I. You've watched me grow as a parent too. And sometimes when I read back over past entries and the encouraging comments you've left, I choke up. From my heart, a sincere thank you.

Anyway, I've been dealing with the full spectrum of parenting this past week.

Being the mother of a junior-high girl is, as yet, the greatest challenge I've ever encountered in my life. I recently found out - from Buffy, no less - that Beebie had broken up with Princeton. Or rather, that she had gotten one of her friends to do it for her. Ugh. Classy move, Beeb.

Now, granted, Beeb and Princeton weren't ever really "Boyfriend and Girlfriend" in the traditional sense, which was why I was perfectly ok with it. They were really just best friends. And Princeton's a great kid. Always had her back.

Turns out, another little boy named Skip told Beebie he'd had a crush on her since last year. And Beeb decided to give Skip a chance, after Skip's friend Jughead (who was "dating" Beebie's friend Elle) convinced her that Princeton was a total loser and a shitty boyfriend, and that "Skip would do anything just to see [her] smile."

Smooth, right? But get this - Jughead convinced Beebie via her Facebook page. The one we told her she wasn't allowed to have, even if she didn't use her real name, even if she only added friends that she actually knows. The one she knew GOD DAMNED WELL was absolutely forbidden.

R and I were LIVID. We deleted her profile immediately and told her to give us all of her logins and passwords to all of her online activities - IM's and email addresses and whatnot. Then yesterday, after she swore up and down that she'd told us everything she'd been using, I caught her creating a brand new email account for herself. And I have no idea what to do about it. She wants us to like her new "boyfriend", but we've told her that if he thinks it's ok for her to do things that are against the rules in this family, we're not going to like him very much.

We've taken away her cell phone for two months (the amount of time equal to how long she's had a Facebook account she knew she wasn't allowed to have), and we've put a keystroke logger program on the computer she and her brothers use. But every time we take something away, she just gets sneakier, and I don't like where this path is leading. I'm scared. Truly scared.

Beeb asked me if she and Elle could meet Skip and Jughead at the park near our house. Actually, Beeb asked if she could go to Turtle Island with Jughead. I should mention that Jughead broke up with an 8th grader to "go out with" Elle, PLUS he told Elle that he loved her, just to give you a sense of the shenanigans I'm dealing with. And I'm also using the " " on any dating terminology as it applies to 11-year-olds because the whole concept of these kids using these words is just fucking ludicrous.

Anyway, Turtle Island. I agreed to take Beeb to the park for just the few minutes before I had to be at the next place I had to be. Then Beeb informed me that Elle needed a ride to get there. Yeah, thanks for treating me like everyone's taxi. So I drove 5 minutes to get Elle, 5 minutes back, and let the two of them meet up with their little boyfriends at the park to I could check the boys out.

I saw the little island-like peninsula (really more of an ithsmus, if I wanted to get technical) in the pond that the park's path circles around. Is that Turtle Island?, I asked a kid who was there with a mom I recognized from the boys' school.

No, he said, THAT's Turtle Island. He was pointing away from the pond, toward a wooded area at the bottom of the embankment.

Where?

THERE.

I squinted and saw that there's a worn path about six inches wide, which disappears into the trees. ANYTHING could happen back in there, and probably does. It's completely hidden from view. COMPLETELY.

And would you like to know what I said to my daughter?

I said, Beeb, YOU ARE OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND IF YOU THINK I'M GOING TO LET YOU GO TO TURTLE ISLAND. OUT. OF. YOUR. FUCKING. MIND.

Yes, friends, I used those exact words and I'm not the least bit sorry. I even told my own mother that those were the words I used.

Anybody else get the vibe that these little boys are bad news? We had the talk about how boys know that you can get a girl to do anything if you tell her you love her, but Beeb insists "Skip's not like that." They're all like that, honey.

Gonna be an interesting summer. Especially since I just found out that Jughead dumped Elle today via text message. Get this - he told her she was being "Obsessive". How does an 11-year-old even know what that means?


So that's one dimension of my parenting woes. The next is the fact that Pie is now the same age that Beebie's friend Jack was when we first met him. Jack, if you're a newer reader, was Beebie's best friend in Second Grade, and he died the following summer right before Beeb's birthday.

Jack's death broke my heart and Beeb's, and that is weighing on me really, really hard. I can't imagine life without Pie, and I imagine Jack was a lot like Pie when he was Pie's age. And both Pie and Jack were born with birth defects. It makes me want to save every single scrap of paper he scrawls something hilarious on, because if something happened to Pie, I'd wish I'd saved more examples of his creative genius to remind myself - and the world - of him.

And this has been a severe struggle for me recently. That's dimension two.


And the third dimension is this: Today was Tito's Kindergarten Graduation. It was precious.



Days like this are when I'm glad I have boys. A lot of the girls were all fancied up in dresses. Fuck that. I don't dress the boys up for shit. Other boy moms apparently feel the same way. None of the boys were dressed up.

I had completely forgotten that Lubaba's mom (in the lovely pink ensemble) was going to be there. I'd like to point out that I still have never seen Lubaba in person. I think that idiot woman made Lubaba up, so people would bring twice as many presents to her son's birthday party.



But I digress. I've been a stay-home-mom since I went on bed rest two months before Pie was born. Next year I'll have no one to keep me company in the mornings. Guess I need to start looking for a jobby-job. I really don't want to.

It's not just because I love hanging out in my jammies and knitting and playing video games all day. It's because there was one little girl in Tito's class whose Mommy couldn't come to the Graduation because she had to work. She didn't want anyone to see her, but she was curled up and weeping. And my heart ached for her.

What could the teacher say? That it's important for parents to go to work too, so we can have money to buy the things we need? Even as delicately as a grown-up could say it, all a kid knows is that something else is more important to my Mommy than I am. I used to work full-time, too, when I only had Beebie, and fortunately my boss was a Mom who recognized the importance of things like this in your child's life.

Then I got an asshole of a boss after that, who was a total douche about stuff like that because she only had cats. (Not a rip on cat people, just saying she didn't have her own kid so she kinda thought that cheesy kid-related stuff was stupid.) So there are some things of Beeb's that I regret having missed.

I'm glad that I've been able to be there for the boys, and I'm loathe to put myself in a spot where I might not be able to be anymore. Of course I fast-forward in my mind to Pie on a therapist's couch explaining how he doesn't know how to give or receive love because his mother missed his 1st grade play.

Incidentally, I forgot to post a pic of it cuz we were so freakin far away from the stage, so here ya go. Pie's in the red plaid, right in the middle.



It was called E-I-E-I-Oops, about the animals on Old McDonald's Farm getting their sounds screwed up.



I remember commenting to R, at the time, that it was like porn for the pedophile who dabbles in beastiality.

Anyway, I don't know if it was the right thing to do or not, but I told the little girl that I knew her Mommy was sad too, because it's really hard for Mommies and Daddies when they can't be there for their little girls. I know exactly what that's like.

So this week has been pretty tough on the Mommy side of PK.